by Alex Miller
Tom Glasson went, ‘Hmm. But at least people like you and I respect it, Annabelle.’
‘It might be more respectful of us if we left it to fade away gracefully?’
He said carefully, ‘You don’t believe these unique sites should be conserved then?’
‘It’s the decay and the abandonment that move us in the first place, isn’t it? About places like this? It’s what makes them so poignant for us. When we conserve them they lose all that. We polish them up and cherish them. We banish their ghosts and make them safe for the future. We falsify them. Conserved things become part of our present. They become ordinary. The very thing we set out to conserve is the thing we inevitably destroy. We keep the fabric but we lose the spirit. It’s one thing to record the past, but it’s something else to conserve it. I’m not sure that I believe in the conservation of places like this.’
He waited for her to go on. Respectful and ready to listen to the elaboration of her position.
‘Oh I don’t know!’ she said with sudden impatience, hearing herself talking as if she were back in Melbourne with Steven and their friends, constructing a defensible position on the issue. Being intellectually respectable. Who for? What did it matter? Constructing a position, she knew only too well, was more about personal politics than convictions or a seeking after the truth. ‘Some days I feel places like this should be preserved and other days I feel they should be left to sink back into the earth without a trace.’ She smiled brightly at him, hoping they could have done with this conversation. She had had enough of it. She was impatient for Bo to come back and take over so that Tom Glasson and the helicopter people could finish their business and go away and the five of them could return to being a family again. Their remaining time together seemed suddenly brief and precious and she resented wasting any more of it on Tom Glasson. ‘Come on!’ she said firmly, and she took his arm. ‘I’ll show you the study.’
Arm-in-arm, they withdrew from the dining room as if they were a couple and they stepped across the passage to the study where she had been working. She caught a whiff of his cologne. At the door to the study she took her arm from his and let him go in ahead of her. He stood by the desk, touching the bevelled timber with his fingers, glancing over her notes and the laptop. ‘You were working in here when we arrived?’
‘Yes.’
‘We intruded on you as well as on the ghosts of the Bigges.’ He smiled.
‘I’ve been making a start on a draft of the report. The European remains. Not conserving, just recording.’ She laughed. Through the window she could see the helicopter poised on the flattened sugar grass, its red and blue hull gleaming in the sunlight like the potent abdomen of a giant hornet. Les Marra was sitting in the pilot’s seat talking on the radio, a gesticulating figure in silhouette. She could feel his energy from here, a man engaged in the affairs of his people, to become their hero, celebrated, potent, powerful and feared. The pilot was crouched beneath his craft servicing an open port. She looked away.
‘A fine room,’ Tom Glasson said, his pale fingers caressing the crafted timber of the desk. ‘My father would have been comfortable here. You expect the smell of pipe tobacco and cigars.’ He looked at her, ‘How long is it, I wonder, since George Bigges worked at this desk?’
She shrugged. ‘Thirty years? I’m not sure.’
He stepped across to the bookshelves and leaned to read the titles, murmuring the maloud, a slender forefinger tracing the spines.
She watched him. ‘You’re based in Sydney, I suppose, are you?’
He straightened. ‘Yeah. We’re Sydney, Annabelle. We’re planning on coming up to Townsville once this dam gets off the ground. Our kids will just love North Queensland.’
Her attention was caught by a movement through the French window behind him. Henry Duncan lowered himself into the squatter’s chair on the verandah, stretched his legs out onto the rests, his arms draped over the armrests, testing the old chair for the style of its comfort. She realised she could no longer hear Arner’s truck, just the steady thump of his music. She noticed then that the helicopter was deserted. No sign of Les Marra or the pilot. She wondered if Bo might have come back.
Tom Glasson stood looking out the window at the helicopter.
‘I’ll show you the rest of the house if you like,’ she offered.
They went out of the study and along the passage to the next room. They went in and stood. Silent, looking. She leaned and opened a small drawer in the dressing table and stepped back for him to see. There were combs and half-sovereigns, pins and faded ribbons. She closed the drawer and opened another. Loose postcards and bundles of small square letters. She picked up a postcard. It was a picture of the Manly water chute. She turned it over and read aloud, Dearest Nel, A lovely day here. Please read what it says the other side of the p.c! Saw old Bing when he was down in Sydney, but rushing around for two whole days in the heat. Spent the morning planting bulbs. She put the card back and closed the drawer.
They made a respectful circuit of the room. Tom Glasson’s hands clasped behind his back, leaning deferentially to view these banal fragments of the Bigges’ privacy, the stained chamber pot under the iron half-tester bed, the canopy fallen across its head, the supports rotted and broken away from the ceiling boards. On the washstand, paw tracks in the dust of its grey marble top, the toilet set intact, basin and ewer, soapdish and toothbrush holder, each item delicately trimmed at rim and base with rows of tiny pink roses. The faded rug, the dressing table with its little drawers and secrets, the bowfronted English chest of drawers. They paused at the fireplace and stood looking at the blue enamel clock in its belljar, the hands at a quarter to eleven, wax roses, grey with age, in urns on either side. And by the French window a modest cedar table with a single drawer and a single straight-backed chair, placed where the evening light must fall and a view of the great trees along Ranna Creek. To sit here and write her journal and her letters. Intimate. Private. Solitary. A woman’s desk . . . Dear Steven, I am not coming back. It could no longer be Dearest. I knew him when I was a child. There are connections between us you would not understand. In this place I am becoming myself again. I don’t think you would find her nearly so interesting as the former Annabelle. She is really a North Queenslander at heart . . .
Tom Glasson said, ‘I think Bo might be back. There’s no one at the helicopter.’
They went out and walked across to the kitchen. Les Marra was leaning over the table, Bo at his shoulder, the pilot standing by looking on. A map spread out on the table before them. Bo smoking the wrinkled stump of a cigarette, holding a corner of the map down with his free hand, his hat set back on his brow. The three of them looked up as Annabelle and Tom Glasson came through the door.
Les Marra put his hand possessively on Bo’s shoulder. ‘This is Bo Rennie, Tom.’ He grinned, a satisfaction in his hard black eyes of something superior; as if Bo Rennie were his trophy, called up by his own mysterious invocation from a secret place in the sacred land. The real thing!
Tom Glasson stepped up. He and Bo shook hands and greeted each other, respectful and wary.
They gathered around the map. A white square in the bottom right-hand corner boldly titled above the legend, BURDEKIN CATCHMENT STUDY—RANNA DAM SITE: PONDED AREA. In the middle of the map a straight blue line linking the steep southern flank of Mount Cauley to the escarpment wall, blocking the course of the Broken River. The gate through which Bo and Dougald had driven the last of Nellie Bigges’ cattle twenty years earlier. The blue line continuing on from the wall, following a contoured elevation through the ridges above the Ranna Creek and eventually linking up with the other side of the gate, islanding in blue the region that was to become a lake. As if it had already become a lake. The legend gave the maximum depth at the blue line as 292 m above the bed of the creek. The road past Zigzag overlooking Lake Ranna, where the valley had been. The spur track marked by a wavering line of red dashes that petered out at a huddle of minute vacant squares: the Ranna homestead
site. Deep beneath the cold waters of the lake.
Les Marra covered the ponded area with his open palm, covering the homestead and its huddle of buildings. The back of his hand was heavily scarred as if he had been burned, his fingers thick and strong. He leaned his weight on his hand and gazed at them steadily from under the wide brim of his black hat, waiting until he had their attention, then waiting some more while they speculated in their minds on what he might be about to say to them. When at last he spoke his voice was thick and congested, ‘She’s all gonna be drowned.’ He watched them, something expectant and exultant in him, the pupils of his eyes in the halflight of the kitchen large, vitreous and nocturnal, as if he saw into their hearts and saw through the thick slab walls of the old kitchen to the black water of the dam, his voice little more than a whisper. ‘We’re near enough three hundred metres under water here.’ The dam a fact in his mind, visiting the future with certainty, his own future.
They stared back at him, venturing nothing against the cold weight of his assurance. His hatred. His black shirt and black jeans, the red and yellow feathers trembling in his hat. A man attired in the uniform of battle. A general of the faithful. A man engaged in a thousand year war. An entranced prophet, elevated above his days, a power delivered into his hand by his vision of the future. He might have announced to them: I have returned not to reclaim this country for my children today but to visit the apocalypse of my retribution upon it! To damn the Bigges and their estates in perpetuity! To obliterate memory of them and sink their pitiful remains beneath the waters of Ranna Creek, risen upon them so unimaginably in these new days! The Bigges built high, but they did not build their dwelling beyond the waters of this flood that I have made! He laughed, an abrupt gasp at the comic ironies of his position, the weight of his presence filling the room. They could only be secondary to him. He gripped Bo by the arm. ‘She’s gonna be a big one this feller, Bo,’ the laughter in his voice, his certainty of eventual victory, even if it were to take a thousand years.
Observing him, Annabelle felt Les Marra’s power and she saw that he was a man to whose memory one day there would be memorials; and she believed she had understood, for the first time in her life, the significant moment of history that she was living. She knew, with a little shock of dismay, with a feeling of personal affront, that Les Marra’s vision of the future would never be reconciled to her existence or to the decency of her own past, the lives of her parents and grandparents. Her existence, indeed, was of no consequence to him. There could be no place for her, or for her kind, in the victory he envisaged. Secretly she hoped Les Marra’s crusade would fail, but she knew it would not fail. For Les Marra had only to persist. He had for ever. There was no time limit to his strategy.
Bo said, ‘Oh yeah, Les. She’s gonna be a big one, old mate.’ And it was not clear whether they spoke of the Ranna Dam or of something far grander.
Tom Glasson looked from one man to the other, puzzlement in his gaze, struggling to interpret their laughter, the hidden language flickering between these two men in the uncertain kitchen light. His understanding suddenly that the dam was an irrelevance. That they would let him have it without a fight. The puzzling knowledge that the dam was not, after all, the point at issue between them. A sense that he had been tricked.
Everyone was looking at Les Marra. Waiting for him. The will of this man. He said nothing. Outside in the hot day the cicadas had fallen silent.
There was a rumble of thunder.
Bo turned to the helicopter pilot. ‘That whirlybird of yours fly around all right in them big electrical storms, Drew?’
‘No she doesn’t,’ the pilot said and he looked at Tom Glasson.
‘Well unless you want to wait out the storm with us, you fellers had better be helicoptering out of here.’ Bo grinned at them. ‘We’ve got plenty of steaks, but we got no beer.’
The pilot said, ‘You reckon we’re going to get it then, Bo?’
Bo turned and lined up a heading, cutting a direction through the wall towards the southwest. ‘She’s coming down from them Carborough Ranges. That’s where we get them from here this time of year, Drew.’ He struck a match and cautiously applied the flame to the tiny stump of his cigarette, pursing his lips to avoid burning his nostrils, sucking the last draw from the remnant of damp tobacco.
Les Marra watched him, smiling.
Bo got the draw and turned and tossed the butt into the open firebox of the range. He sniffed and sucked his teeth, motioning out the door to the tilting pergola, ‘Free beds in the old house if you fellers want to stay a night or two. Nellie and old George won’t be needing theirs. I’ll take you around and show you some of this country. There’s some good stuff to see. Bring your cameras. Big waterfall up that Lemon Tree gully.’ He turned to LesMarra, ‘That’s right, eh, Les?’
‘There’s good stuff here all right,’ Les Marra agreed.
Tom Glasson said, ‘Thank you, Bo. I appreciate your offer. There’s nothing I’d like better. But I’m afraid it’ll have to be some other time. I have to be back for a meeting in Townsville this evening. How long are you expecting to spend down here this visit?’
Bo reached into his shirt pocket for his Drum and stood considering the design on the blue packet. ‘Well, she’s just a preliminary look for us this time, Tom. Annabelle’s doing some work over there at the house and on the buildings, which could take another day or two. I’ve been having a bit of a poke around. We’ve got a job over at Burranbah to finish before we turn this one over.’ He looked at Tom Glasson. ‘We could get a fresh in some of them gullies out of this storm. That might hold us up a while.’
‘Maybe you could give me a call when you get back to Townsville and we can make a time for us all to get together? I’ll be seeing Susan tomorrow.’
‘That’ll be good, Tom. We’ll do that.’ Bo drew out a Tally-Ho paper and stuck it to his lower lip, nipping the tobacco out of the packet with his stained thumb and forefinger.
Les Marra was observing the exchange between the two men with evident delight.
Tom Glasson made no move. The pilot was watching him, anxious to leave. Tom said, ‘Has the flow in the creek ever failed, Bo? That you know of?’
Les Marra laughed. ‘That you know of, Bo?’ he said.
Bo’s hand went out, the encompassing gesture. ‘The Ranna won’t fail you, Tom. Them old folk had it the springs held good right through the biggest droughts.’
Tom Glasson leaned, a little uncertain of his ground here, the fingers of one hand touching the tabletop for balance probably, or looking for certainty in his dealings, ‘When you say old folk, Bo, you mean . . . ?’
‘I mean the Bigges! Them Bigges! They seen the nineteen-twenty-three drought. The thirty-five drought. These springs held good then. She’s not gonna fail you, Tom.’ He looked directly at Tom Glasson. ‘The Ranna will fill your dam for you with good clean spring water. You’ll be able to see clear to the bottom on a sunny day.’ He made a circling motion with his hand and looked down through it, ‘Watch them big catfish going round and round chasing their tails!’
Les Marra’s laughter rumbling in his chest like the storm rumbling in the ranges.
There was a loud crack of thunder. The helicopter pilot winced. There was a sound like a spray of gravel hitting the ripple-iron roofing over their heads.
‘Here she comes,’ Bo said. ‘A touch of hail in her.’
An uncanny silence followed.
A change of light outside, and a stillness. The warm smell of carrion newly exposed to the humid air.
Bo looked at Les Marra. ‘Old possum curled up and died in the roof.’
Les Marra showed his teeth in a wide grin. ‘Old Panya in this one.’
Annabelle prayed they would leave before the storm grounded them.
‘Come on!’ the pilot said. ‘Let’s get going! Where’s Henry?’
Bo said, ‘There’s a feller sleeping over there on the verandah. He was laid out on that old squatter chair like a dead man.
’
‘I’ll go and wake him,’ Annabelle offered.
‘If he’s gonna wake, I reckon that thunder might have already woke him, Annabellebeck.’
They shook hands all round and said their hurried goodbyes, bunching up at the door, following Annabelle. Bo calling after them, ‘You want your map?’
Les Marra turned at the door, ‘You keep it, Bo. Have a good look at it. Them Hearns up at that Zigzag place are gonna make themselves a little fortune running a hostfarm. When the lake’s full they’ll be sitting on the prettiest piece of ground around here for miles. There’s gonna be a view from that stony ridge of theirs right over the lake and clear through to Mount Crompton, the winter sun coming up in their eyes. The Ranna Lake Hostfarm.’ He laughed. ‘And a brand new bitumen road right by their front door all the way to Mackay and the highway. They’ll get the tourist buses up there. They reckon the Japanese like a view over water. You ought to think about running a hostfarm yourself, Bo. She’ll do the work, won’t she?’ He laughed and spat aside. ‘It’s not cattle any more, old mate. That Hearn place is what they call good country these days.’ He stood considering Bo. ‘Dougald’s figured that much out for himself.’ He firmed his hat, ‘See you later, Bo.’ He turned and followed the others.
